“The Alabama Feaver [sic] rages here with great violence and has carried off vast numbers of our citizens,” wrote a startled North Carolinian to a friend in November of 1817. “There is no question that this feaver is contagious…, for as soon as one neighbor visits another who has just returned from the Alabama he immediately discovers the same symptoms which are exhibited by the person who has seen the allureing [sic] Alabama.” While these words may contain as much sarcasm as genuine alarm, the Alabama Territory did seem to possess a magnetic attraction to aspiring emigrants. The movement of people it inspired would become the enduring hallmark of Alabama’s formative years.

In an era in which notions of opportunity, freedom, and wealth were as closely bound up in the soil as at any point before or since, the Alabama Territory ﬂaunted millions of acres of some of the country’s richest land. Exceptionally well suited for agriculture, it stood virtually uncharted and untilled. The bulk lay under massive stands of choice timber in forests abounding with game. Well-watered by a series of large navigable rivers and innumerable tributary creeks and rivulets, Alabama was the frontier settler’s dream. Anyone willing to do a little work, it seemed, could make a living in such a paradise. Early settlers often held the bountiful land in which they rushed to settle in near-mythical reverence, their awestruck descriptions of its beauty expressing their captivation and their anticipation of bringing their little piece of this dreamland under production for immediate pecuniary gain and, hopefully, long-term security. “You cannot imagine a sight so beautiful as this country,” extolled writer Anne Royall in 1818, continuing, “to compare it with the Elysian ﬁelds of the ancients, would give but a feeble idea of it.” The swarms of yeomen farmers and slave-owning planters that descended on the land seem collectively to have ﬁrmly believed it to be the richest they had seen, perhaps the richest that existed.

A ﬂood of ambitious migrants swarmed over the ﬁelds and valleys of the Alabama Territory even before it could put in place the infrastructure necessary for the orderly disposal of its acreage. Settlers arrived so suddenly and in such astonishing numbers that historians term the phenomenon the “Great Migration.” This movement is associated with a larger, generally western expansion of the United States, which resulted in the Americanization of the trans-Appalachian frontier with dizzying rapidity. If the Mississippi Territory stood at the movement’s center, Alabama ranked as its epicenter. Just before the War of 1812, the area that became the state of Mississippi claimed over three times the American population of the future state of Alabama; some 31,000 residents compared to barely 9,000. (These numbers include both white and black individuals, but they did not reﬂect Native American inhabitants.) By the end of the ensuing decade, Alabama boasted nearly 150,000 free and enslaved residents—an astounding sixteen-fold increase—while Mississippi claimed a respectable 75,000. Anecdotal evidence oﬀers even more clarity; in the course of about a week on the eve of the formation of the Alabama Territory, one traveler along the Federal Road in Georgia reported seeing an incredible 141 wagons, 102 carts, 10 stagecoaches, 14 gigs, 29 droves of cattle, 27 droves of hogs, 2 droves of sheep, and some 3,840 people—all bound for Alabama.

Most new arrivals were farmers, planters, speculators or slaves, but there was also a smattering of tradesmen and professionals, especially lawyers. An arduous journey, more often than not conducted in the fall over wilderness trails, characterized their passage. Some rode carriages or traveled on horseback, but a signiﬁcant number walked. They spanned the country’s numerous watercourses on its few ferries whenever possible, but most of the time had to resort to their own ingenuity and daring. A handful of rude inns stood along some of the major routes, but an exceedingly small number were willing or able to avail themselves of such basic amenities as a purchased meal or resting place. Most camped roadside, serenaded by owls, wolves, and cougars as they gathered around their ﬁres and watched for the robbers and thieves who were greatly feared but in truth rarely seen. Over the weeks-long treks, they occasionally got lost, stuck, and even discouraged, but there could be no turning back. The Alabama Territory’s immigrants had more often than not uprooted themselves from the only home they had ever known and taken a one-way journey in pursuit of elusive, glimmering, opportunity.

The Alabama Territory’s immigrants had more often than not uprooted themselves from the only home they had ever known and taken a one-way journey in pursuit of elusive, glimmering, opportunity.

They hailed in large part from other, established south-ern states. From the north came Tennesseans and Kentuckians, while from the east came Georgians, North and South Carolinians, and even a few Virginians. Perhaps the most fabled of settlers in the Territory arrived from the south, however. Exiled veterans of Napoleon’s defeated army and French refugees from a slave insurrection on the Caribbean island of Saint-Domingue (Haiti) made their way to what is now Marengo County via Mobile beginning in the summer and fall of 1817. The federal government had given them over 90,000 acres along the Tombigbee on which to cultivate grapes and olives and, by extension, form the nucleus of a prospering bastion of frontier settlement. But the Vine and Olive Colony never ﬂourished, and illness, crop failure, and alternative plans doomed the scheme to a footnote in the Alabama Territory’s story. The much larger portion of early settlers traced their ancestry, often within a generation, to the British Isles. A similar percentage traced theirs to Africa. The slaves among this emigrant tide came unwillingly, but they contributed immeasurably to the social and cultural development of their new home. The ﬁrst generation of Alabama settlers also held a few Yankees, mostly enterprising New Englanders such as Henry Hitchcock, who perceived their chances of professional success greater in a developing country unburdened with the restrictions of establishment. Arriving in Mobile with a mere twenty-ﬁve cents, no job and no contacts, within three years, he helped write the Alabama state constitution. Hitchcock’s rise may have been exceptional, but it was no abstraction; Alabama inherently presented favorable prospects for the industrious, as so much was needed so quickly.

Surveying land to facilitate clear boundaries and legal sales stood as the most urgent step toward state-making. Most of the Territory open for settlement would be sold as part of the largely undocumented federal do-main only recently acquired via cession from native groups. Other sections languished in a tangle of overlapping patents issued by French, English, and Spanish authorities. Throughout, squatters already gathered in hopes of being granted preemption or at least being in favorable position to buy their claim. Surveyors such as the capable Thomas Freeman, a friend of George Washington who had helped design the nation’s capital, divided the Territory into sections, ranges, and townships.

The free-for-all of land buying began in earnest in 1817 at oﬃces in such places as Milledgeville, Georgia; St. Stephens; and Huntsville; and the exchange of notes and money—the former being much more common—soon reached a fever pitch. In the Tennessee Valley alone by the end of 1818, ofﬁcers had processed sales of over one million acres purchased for over $7 million. Purchases of large tracts of thousands of acres were not unusual, especially in the rich river bottom lands prized by the ﬁrst wave of Alabama planters, but most plots were much smaller, purchased in fractional sections for about $2 per acre with a nominal amount of cash down and the remainder due in up to three years.

But staking one’s claim was just the ﬁrst step in the process by which thousands of people would soon form a new part of the American union. As the year of the Alabama Territory’s frenzied birth segued into the year of its measured internal establishment, the immediate concern of forming a government to manage and direct its growth rose to the fore.

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Mike Bunn currently serves as director of operations at Historic Blakeley State Park in Spanish Fort, Alabama. This department of Alabama Heritage magazine is sponsored by the Alabama Bicentennial Commission and the Alabama Tourism Department.